CNN - Lockdown has made London a boomtown for rats

(CNN)It's just before daybreak in Richmond on the southern bank of the River Thames, and pest controller Michael Coates (Combat Pest Control) is patrolling the rubbish bins for what is normally an elusive enemy -- rats.

"There'll be something in there for sure," he says, kicking an overflowing waste container. "Rats are like little survival machines; wherever you get reliable access to food waste, they'll keep coming back."
Coates' prey has become more conspicuous in London the longer England's lockdown lasts.

What's more, the animals are on the move.
Pest controllers say that, as many restaurants and office buildings in London's bustling city center remain empty, rats are forced to migrate to more residential areas in search of food.
Families spending more time at home -- and eating all their meals there -- have led to an increase in refuse and that is luring rats into suburban dwellings. Meanwhile, bird feeders -- kept replenished through the winter -- are encouraging rodents to burrow in backyards.

"We had a case of an old lady who used to feed her beloved robins," Coates tells CNN. "By the time she called us there were maybe 10 to 15 rats digging around the flower beds," he adds.

Paul Claydon, another exterminator, based on the edge of Epping Forest in the capital's east, has seen worse. He says he recently killed off a colony trying to dig into a rabbit hutch to eat an unsuspecting family pet.
"It might be that we are seeing and hearing them more often, working from home in the office under the loft... but I fear London may get a big surprise when it reopens," Claydon says. "Especially if businesses and properties that did have a problem haven't kept up with their pest control plans."

Coates and Claydon have both left long careers in other fields to set up small firms in what has become a booming sector.
Coates, a veteran of the Iraq War, founded his outfit five years ago and has since written an Book named "War and Pest: from Basra to bedbugs."

The British Pest Control Association (BPCA), which represents 700 vermin catchers across the country, said its members reported a 51% hike in rodent activity during the first lockdown, in the spring of 2020, and a 78% increase in November after another lockdown was brought in. They haven't yet calculated figures for this year but told CNN sightings were up, presenting a public health problem which many homeowners are left to deal with on their own.
"We may see rats now where we wouldn't normally because they are so desperate," says Natalie Bungay, of the BPCA. "Rats can chew through very hard substances like soft metals and brick."

A spokesperson for the borough of Richmond upon Thames, however, told CNN it does not collect data on rats and does not offer pest control services.
In 2017, after a video of rats pouring out of a flower bed in the borough of Harrow went viral, Conservatives in the Greater London Assembly (GLA) commissioned a report which found more than 100 complaints were logged with councils each day.
Called "Rat Land," it warned the city should get a grip on its rodent problem before attracting the bad press that dogged Paris after similar footage surfaced of their "super rats" crawling all over public parks near the Louvre.
Nobody really knows how many rats there are in London, though some private surveys from exterminators claim they could number up to 20 million. It's likely there are more of them than the city's nine million human inhabitants, whose population growth is slowing, according to the Office for National Statistics.

Видео CNN - Lockdown has made London a boomtown for rats канала Combat Pest Control